Phillip Dean, MD, is a surgeon site lead for the DEBUT study at Valley Medical Center. As a practicing colorectal surgeon for 25 years, he has watched how recommendations for when to have elective surgery for diverticulitis seemed to swing back and forth without a lot of good data.
“I tried to keep track and give patients the best information I could, but up to this point there hasn’t been a lot of good information as to when to have the surgery,” he says.
Results of a report published by CERTAIN’s Initiative to Support Patient Involvement in Research (INSPIRE) yielded a number of important findings on what makes patient-researcher partnerships successful as well as what is still needed in terms of training and support. The authors also identified recommendations for supporting these partnerships.
We’d like to welcome Legacy Health as one of our newly launched DEBUT study sites! Their investigative team includes three colorectal surgeons at Legacy Medical Group-Gastrointestinal Surgery as well as Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center.
Lisa Strate, MD, MPH, is a CERTAIN investigator working on the DEBUT study. She is a gastroenterologist at UW Medicine’s Harborview Medical Center who specializes in the care of patients with diverticular disease. As a diverticulitis researcher for over 10 years, Dr. Strate is excited to be involved in DEBUT because the study will help to answer practical questions for clinicians and patients, including how diverticulitis and available treatments impact quality of life.
Revascularization better for peripheral arterial disease
Funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative (TCPI) is a national effort designed to support clinicians in achieving large-scale health care transformation. UW Medicine is one of 39 health care collaborative networks selected to participate and will receive about $30 million to develop a Practice Transformation Network (PTN) across the Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho
The Comparative Effectiveness Research Translation Network (CERTAIN) has been approved for a $12.9 million award by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to study appendectomy versus “antibiotics-first” for the treatment of uncomplicated appendicitis.
Appendicitis is the most common reason for emergency abdominal surgery—approximately 300,000 people undergo an appendectomy in the US each year. The advent of laparoscopic surgery has made the procedure safer and reduced complications. However, despite the safety and efficacy of appendectomy, there is still some uncertainty in the healthcare community around the necessity of appendectomy for managing appendicitis.
Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) are becoming an important part of research and quality improvement projects aimed at improving healthcare. PROs capture how a patient feels about their symptoms, health, healing, and quality of life. That information, combined with traditional clinical data, gives doctors a better understanding of their patients’ outcomes and the quality of care they provide.
Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are a class of drugs used regularly to treat inflammation and reduce pain. As doctors try to avoid negative effects associated with opioid medications, the use of intravenous NSAIDs for treating pain after surgery has increased. But over the past decade, several small studies have shown a connection between NSAID use and complications with healing for surgeries involving the gastrointestinal tract.
